Automatic collection

Stripe provides a number of automated revenue recovery features for one-off invoices to help collect payments that might have failed otherwise. These include automatically updating your users’ saved cards, sending emails when a failed payment occurs, and retrying cards at strategic times.

Smart Retries

Using AI, Smart Retries chooses the best times to retry failed payment attempts to increase the chance of successfully paying an invoice. The AI model behind Smart Retries uses time-dependent, dynamic signals, such as:

• The number of different devices that have presented a given payment method in the last N hours.
• The best time to pay (payments made for debit cards in certain countries might be slightly more successful at 12:01 AM in local time zones).

Stripe uses this information to assess when to retry payments. We continuously learn from new purchaser behaviors and transactions, which provide for a more targeted approach over traditional rules-based payment retry logic. Invoices with the auto_advance attribute set to true go through the Smart Retries flow (if enabled) for card payment methods. By default, Stripe doesn’t automatically retry failed non-card payment methods and Direct Debit payments except for ACH Direct Debit. To enable automatic retries for Direct Debit payment methods, you must join the applicable preview. Stripe skips retries for these payment methods, and instead attempts the dunning end action (such as canceling or pausing the subscription).

Smart Retries reattempts the charge according to your specifications for the number of retries and the maximum duration. You can set the Smart Retry policy to retry payment a specific number of times within a time period: 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 1 month, or 2 months. The recommended default setting is 8 tries within 2 weeks. You can also use automations to create different retry policies for different customer segments.

You can override this behavior by disabling Smart Retries and defining your own custom retry rules. When you enable dunning, the next_payment_attempt attribute on the invoice.payment_failed webhook indicates when Stripe attempts the next collection.

Failed payment notifications

In the Subscriptions and emails tab of your billing settings, scroll to the Manage failed payments for subscriptions section. The setting Send emails when card payments fail turns on automatic customer emails for failed payments.

If a payment failure occurs on a one-off invoice and Link to a Stripe-hosted page is selected, Stripe sends a link to the Hosted Invoice Page to the customer.

You can customize the color, icon, and logo of your customer emails and Stripe-hosted page in the Branding settings.

Manage invoices sent to customers

In the Subscriptions and emails tab of your billing settings, scroll to the Manage invoices sent to customers section to:

• Email finalized invoices to customers—You can turn this option on to always email your customers a finalized invoice. This setting only affects invoices where the collection_method is set to send_invoice.
• Change a past due invoice’s status—You can mark an invoice as uncollectible if it’s past due by 30, 60, or 90 days. You can also leave the invoice past-due.
• Automatically reconcile partial payments that meet a minimum—You can instruct Stripe to mark an invoice as paid if ​​it’s partially paid within the set amount. For example, if the payment received from your customer is within 20 USD or less of the total (or at whatever amount you configure), then this setting applies a credit to the invoice for the outstanding amount. It then marks the invoice as paid.

Automatic reminders for one-off invoices

To turn on automatic reminders for unpaid, one-off invoices, go to the Invoices tab of your billing settings, scroll to the Manage advanced invoicing features section, and turn on Send reminders if a one-off invoice hasn’t been paid. For each reminder you want to send, click Add reminder and select a schedule from the dropdown list. You can schedule reminders for before, on, or after the invoice due date.

If at the scheduled time, the invoice already has payments that are under processing, Stripe won’t send that reminder email to the customer to prevent confusion. However, if the invoice has open payments or payments that require your customer’s confirmation or other actions, the customer on the invoice will receive the scheduled reminder.